The Dalander Colony at Swede Point, Iowa

THE DALANDER COLONY AT SWEDE POINT,
IOWA
ROBERTA ANDERSON SMITH
When one is born into a community where many of one's
friends are the direct descendents of the founder, one absorbs the
history of the settlement and is never sure just where the in­formation
comes from. This is the case with me.
In 1846, the widow Anna Dalander and her party from Sweden
settled Swede Point (thirty miles north of Des Moines), which
later became Madrid, Iowa, where I was bom. They were look­ing
for New Sweden, some forty miles west of Burlington, which
their neighbor from Östergötland, Peter Cassel, had settled the
year before, but became lost because of a mistake in directions.
After the Cassels learned the whereabouts of the Dalanders,
Carl Johan (Charles), son of Peter, among others, came to Swede
Point. He took out a claim on land and married Ullricka (Ul­rika)
Dalander, daughter of Anna, in 1848. Theirs is thought
to be the first Swedish wedding in the state of Iowa.
It was among the descendents of these two families—the Cas­sels
and the Dalanders—that I grew up. The "Grandma" Da­lander
I knew as a child, was a daughter-in-law of Anna
Dalander; Eva Elisabeth Svensson had been twelve years old
when she came from Sweden, and at seventeen she had married
the widower, Eric Dalander, whose wife had died in childbirth
the year before. My older brothers and sisters remember her
more vividly than I, as in their childhood our family lived across
the street from her. Many a time, they told me, Grandma Da­lander
nursed one or another of them back to health with reme­dies
learned from the Indians when she first arrived in America.
Her cookie jar was always kept full by her daughter, Minnie,
with whom she lived during her later years, and her generosity
was well remembered by the children of the neighborhood. Grand­ma
Dalander died in 1917. When I had finished college and was
sailing for Japan for work in the Y. W. C. A., it was Minnie Da­lander
who came to the ship in San Francisco to see me off.
But before my generation, my father, B. Frank Anderson, came
182
to know the Dalander family intimately. In 1868, at eight years
of age, he went with his family from Illinois to Iowa in a covered
wagon, and his family lived for two years in a cabin built by a
member of the Dalander party. During that time, my father
worked for Mrs. Eric Dalander—our Grandma Dalander—haul­ing
in wood for her stove and doing odd jobs which a boy of his
age could perform. Father had an insatiable curiosity and plied
her with questions about life in Sweden, their trip on the sailing
vessel, and how they came to Swede Point to make their home
in the wilderness. It truly was a wilderness, for at the time the
party arrived in central Iowa, the Territory was not yet a state,
and the Indians were constantly on the move, en route to their
new homes in Kansas. There were no settlements nearby. It
was two hundred miles to Keokuk, where they had to go back
to purchase flour, salt, and other supplies that the land did not
yield, and to mail letters back to Sweden.
Father was a constant writer and his story of pioneer life was
featured in seven articles appearing during the first half of 1937
in the short-lived M i d n i g h t Sun, published in Des Moines. He
also wrote the story of the Dalanders' journey from Sweden in
a little booklet entitled A H i s t o r y S t o r y . When St. John's L u ­theran
Church in Madrid was erecting a new building in 1924,
Father was asked to write the story of the early settlers who
had founded the church, to be put in the cornerstone. The con­gregation
had been formed in 1859, he wrote, and by 1866 a gen­eral
meeting was called to erect the first church on land donated
by the Dalanders. Father joined the church when his family
arrived two years later. He records, "I remember that my first
contribution was to the church bell; it was all I had, a paper 10^5
bill about 3Vz inches long and lYz inches wide. That was in 1872
when I was 12 years old. That bell is still used and has about
the finest tone I have ever heard in a church bell."
For eight years my father lived with our family in Kenosha,
Wisconsin, where he wrote and talked about the pioneers, so that
we should know about them. At age ninety-two, "not old enough
to go there," he said, he went into the Iowa Lutheran Home in
Madrid, to "cheer up the old people." He celebrated his one
hundredth birthday there on February 29, 1960, and died that
December, content to meet his Master.
Father was noted as a storyteller of pioneer days. Young
163
people in Madrid schools were constantly going to him to learn
the history of their families, practically all of whom he could
remember. He shared his knowledge in so aimiable a way that
we, his family, and others, too, enjoyed his tales of early days,
and stored them in our memories.
F. A. Danborn, who owned the dime store in Madrid where
we children used to spend our hard-earned pennies for candy,
was an expert on local history. He wrote an article entitled
"Our Swedish Pioneers in Swede Point," which came out in Prä¬
rieblomman for 1909 (pp. 198-215)—where his name is given
as "Danbom"— the only article on the subject published in Eng­lish.
He no doubt received his information from Grandma Eva
Dalander as my father did, for their stories generally coincide.
There were others, too, who told of the old days. The family of
Mrs. Eva Dalander, wife of Eric Dalander,
was the last to die of the 41 Swedish immi­grants
who came to Iowa and settled at
Swede Point (Madrid) in 1846.
164
John Cassel, son of Carl Johan and Ullricka Cassel, were friends
of our family. One of their sons, my age, was confirmed with me.
Often our family would be invited to their home at the edge
of town, where I remember they had a tree with delicious June
apples.
When in later years I often returned to Iowa to visit my father,
I would see the late Julius Johnson, a grandson, and Esther Sund­berg,
a granddaughter of Eva Dalander, who were always ready
to share their memories of the early days of our town. Julius
was a young man suffering from hemophilia, who lived next door
to Father and was always solicitous for his welfare. He had a
keen mind and memory, and a strong interest in his forebears
which he would generously share with me. Esther Sundberg
wishes she had sought more information about the early days
from her grandmother, but she has verified dates and facts of
the Dalander family recorded in the family Bible.
$ 4 $
The Swedish ship, A u g u s t a , sailed out of the harbor of Gothen­burg
for New York on August 2, 1846, carrying a group of forty-two
persons from Östergötland, led by the widow Anna Dalan­der
from Västerlösa parish. They had been influenced to make
the journey by letters from their former neighbor, Peter Cassel,
who had left Sweden the year before and founded the settlement,
New Sweden, west of Burlington, Iowa, on the Skunk River. The
party now hoped to join them in the New World.
Anna Dalander, 44, had secured passports for herself and
family in Linköping under the name "Widow Anna Larsdåtter."
They called themselves Dahlander when they reached America.
As time went on, the spelling was changed to Dalander, by which
the family is now known. A l l but one. John Milton, great-grandson
of Anna Dalander, changed the spelling to Delander
when he went West. His wife, Dola, writes, "I never did hear
about the name Dahlander being taken after they reached Amer­ica.
I had it figured out that the name had its origin in Sweden
from people living in a valley or 'dal'."
Anna Dalander emigrated together with her six children: Eric,
25, Lars Peter, 24, Anders Johan, 22, Sven, 15, Anna, 23, and
Ullricka, 21. The girls came from "the factory in Motala"; evi­dently
they had been working away from home.
For the journey, the party took with them their own bedding,
165
food, and cooking utensils, as a stove for the use of forty fami­lies
was provided on deck. The men had with them tools and
equipment, to be ready to begin farming when they reached their
destination. Cassel had told of the farm land available, and they
hoped to make a good livelihood.
The A u g u s t a sailed through the Skaggerak and into the North
Sea, then out into the Atlantic Ocean, north of Scotland. Days
were much alike on the water, with the exception of Sunday,
when Jacob Nilsson, a devout layman, read from the P o s t i l l a , a
book of Martin Luther's sermons translated from the German
into Swedish. Anders Johan Dalander had a splendid tenor
voice and led the singing of familiar hymns.
On the Atlantic, a young man of their party, Johannes Jacobs-son,
died. The body was wrapped in sailducking and bound to
a ballasted plank. The passengers stood with bowed heads while
the captain read the funeral service; then the corpse was lowered
into the watery grave.
After a voyage of nine weeks and three days, the ship arrived
in New York. Here they were met by the Methodist minister,
Olof Gustaf Hedström, who conducted Swedish religious meet­ings
in a disbanded vessel called the Bethel Ship. Members of
the Dalander party attended these meetings and were given a
Swedish New Testament as they departed for Iowa.
Sources differ as to the manner in which the party went from
New York to Albany, to go west on the Erie Canal. One states
that they went by steamboat, another that they puchased a
barge in New York, which they covered so that they would be
protected from the heat of the sun and the rain.
Railroads had been built but did not extend to Iowa. Besides,
after visiting the railroad station and learning that the trains ran
at fifteen miles per hour, they thought they had better not risk it,
especially as the cars appeared very flimsy to them. All were
used to water travel in Sweden, which they felt would be safer.
From Albany, their barge—whether purchased there or in New
York— was pulled by horse or mule team the 364 miles of the
Erie Canal. They lived on the barge, buying their food at the
stations where supplies were sold to travellers, while the horse
or mule teams, driven tandem, were exchanged for fresh teams.
Finally at Buffalo, they were pulled by a paddle-boat on Lake
Erie to Toledo, Ohio, thence by way of Defiance to St. Mary's
166
on the Miami-Erie Canal, and on to Cincinnati. From there they
floated down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River, and finally,
were pulled by paddle boat up to Keokuk, Iowa.
Between the towns of Keokuk and Burlington, the Des Moines
rapids on the Mississippi River presented an obstacle to naviga­tion
when water was low. It could be that in 1845 the Cassels
had arrived during high water and their boat had gone on north
to Burlington, where the Skunk River empties into the Mississip­pi.
That would make Peter Cassel's directions to the Dalander
party—"walk along the east side of the river and you will find
us"—reasonable.
However, it was a period of low water, or as one historian sug­gested,
the captain of the paddle-wheeler pulling the Dalander
barge felt that his dilapidated old vessel could not make the
rapids, so he unhitched their barge at Keokuk. When they saw
the Des Moines River emptying into the Mississippi there, the
Dalander party believed it was the river they should follow, so
they began inquiring for the Cassel settlement. No one they ap­proached
had ever heard of New Sweden or their friends.
It has been suggested that Cassel did not know of the two
rivers, the Skunk and the Des Moines. However, his letter of
February 9, 1846, notes: "Two educated countrymen from Väs­tergötland,
whose longer residence in the country has made them
thoroughly familiar with conditions and in whom we have the
highest confidence, have associated themselves with us and we
have taken a common claim to one thousand t u n n l a n d of the
aforementioned land, whose fertility and excellent location on
the navigable Des Moines River is not excelled by any tract in
the entire state of Iowa." However, they did not go there to
claim the land as they were getting along reasonably well where
they were and had excellent neighbors.
Therefore at Keokuk the Dalander party sold their barge.
Magnus Andersson and Jacob Nilsson bought a team and wagon
for hauling their trunks and household goods. The other families
hired men and teams for hauling, and the group was ready to
proceed on foot up the east side of the Des Moines River. Ac­cording
to one source, there was a stove factory in Keokuk,
where they bought a stove to carry with them. They also se­cured
supplies, such as flour, sugar, and salt.
That same year the Mormons had been expelled from Nauvoo,
167
Illinois, just across the river from Montrose, a short distance
north of Keokuk. The Dalander party no doubt saw remnants
of this exodus of thousands to the Mormons' new location at Salt
Lake City, and felt sure that they were on the well-travelled
(for that time) route to New Sweden. However, soon the Mor­mons
crossed the Des Moines River and continued west across
the southern tier of Iowa counties. The Dalander party, keep­ing
to Peter Cassel's instructions, did not cross, but followed
along the east side of the river till they reached Fort Des Moines.
They did not know that when they were at Agency, where the
Indians dealt with the U. S. Government in the transfer of land
to the whites, they were less than 25 miles from New Sweden.
They found very few settlers the farther they walked from
the Mississippi, for the treaty of 1833 with the Indians had ceded
to the U. S. only land 50 miles west of the river for settlement.
Later treaties had ceded all of the Iowa Territory to the U. S.,
but the Indians were not all removed till 1846. However, no-
Charles Gaston, the first white settler of
Boone County.
168
where on their walk into the wilderness were they molested by
any Indians, who now, disgruntled, were en route to their new
home in Kansas.
Fort Des Moines, now the city of Des Moines, was a stockade
surrounded by a few log cabins, situated at the junction of the
Racoon and Des Moines Rivers. Mrs. Dalander tried to buy some
supplies from the soldiers of the garrison, but the only thing they
had in abundance were tobacco and whiskey, the latter being sold
at 30 cents a gallon.
Learning of the long journey this group of Swedes had made,
the soldiers urged them to settle there, to buy the land on which
the state capital now stands, which was then offered at $1.25
an acre. But the group was determined to find New Sweden and
continued to inquire for their friend, Peter Cassel.
Then one soldier recalled that a man by the name of Charles
Gaston lived about thirty miles north of the fort. Perhaps he
was the man they were looking for. The group decided to make
one more try to find their friends, so they continued up the beau­tiful
Des Moines River valley. At the southern edge of what
is now Boone County, the oxen hurried their pace and their
nostrils began to quiver as they smelled water. The men found
a spring, cleaned it out, and men and animals were all refreshed
by the cool, clear water. While there, a dog came barking to
greet them and a man appeared. He was the old soldier Gaston,
but alas, not one of the Cassel group. After serving in the army
in the 1830s, Gaston had just come in January to "the beautiful
land," as the Indians called Iowa, to stake a claim.
It was now the middle of September and time to build houses
for protection from the winter. After a conference, the group
decided that here was the place where they should stay. Here
there was a spring, the river was nearby for the women to wash
the clothes they had worn on the long journey, there would be
fish, deer, and other game to eat, and Gaston promised them po­tatoes
and corn from his stock to supply them for the winter.
It looked like a good place to settle down, for the soil was rich,
there were plenty of trees to fell for building their houses and
enough for fuel for the winter. They named their location Swede
Point, often spoken of as Swedes Point.
Before they began work, however, Mrs. Dalander sent a young
man back to Keokuk, 200 miles down the river, to mail a letter
189
to Sweden to be forwarded back to New Sweden, in Iowa, to
tell Peter Cassel of their location. However, before the letter
reached them, the Cassels somehow learned of the whereabouts
of their friends and sent one of their group to Swede Point.
Having come to Swede Point by mistake, most of the Dalander
party now decided to join the Cassel group in New Sweden. Only
four families stayed, including Anna Dalander and her children,
Eric, Lars Peter, Anders Johan, Sven, Ullricka, and Anna Ca¬
thrine; Magnus Andersson, his wife and six children; Anders
Adamsson and wife; and Jacob Nilsson, his wife, and Eva Elisa­beth
Svensson, evidently their fosterdaughter—the Grandma
Dalander of my childhood—who married Eric Dalander in 1852.
Anna Cathrine Dalander meanwhile married Charles Gaston
sometime before 1850.
The group took out preemption claims to the land they oc­cupied.
Eric Dalander selected the land where they first built
their homes, in Section 23. Johan (John) Dalander took out a
claim in Section 26, Sven Dalander in Section 35, and the widow
Anna Dalander in the northwest corner of Section 36.
The story is told of Anna Dalander that two Indians armed
with long knives suddenly appeared in her cabin and pointed to­ward
the cupboard. Frightened, she took out one thing after
another in an effort to appease them, but they simple laughed
at her. Finally, when she took down a large plug of tobacco,
they drew their knives—but only to cut themselves each a good
chew, after which they peacefully departed, leaving the widow
badly shaken.
Anna decided her land would make a good location for a town,
which she first had platted in 1851. It was settled a few years
later, following her death in 1854, and came to be called Madrid.
The name was provided by Gaston, who served as her executor.
He is said to have often been sarcastic and spiteful. He had
a Spaniard working for him who constantly spoke of Spain and
its capital. When the time came for a final survey of Swede Point
in 1855, Gaston had a quarrel with the Dalander brothers. Hav­ing
the power to do so as Anna Dalander's executor, he is said
to have chosen the name Madrid for the new town to spite both
the Spaniard and the Swedes.
As the stage coach line had made a stop on Anna Dalander's
land, a post office was established at Swede Point. Later, in 1871,
170
the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad was laid through
Madrid, about a mile to the east, so a petition was sent to Wash­ington
to give the post office the same name as the town.
But Gaston did not quite win his altercation with the Swedes,
for to this day the town of Madrid is pronounced "Mad'rid" by
by everyone who knows Iowa.
NOTE
In addition to the recollections of my father and others I have known in
and around Madrid, my father's writings on the subject, and Danborn's
("Danbom's") article in Prärieblomman (1909), mentioned in the text,
several other sources have been of use in preparing this article. Beth
Proescholdt and Ruth Bergstrom's booklet, Documents and Descendants of
'Peter Cosset and the Settlement at New Sweden, Iowa (n. p., 1965), has
been helpful. Nils William Olsson, Swedish Passenger A r r i v a l s i n New
York, 1820-1850 (Chicago, 1967) provides valuable details on the early
settlers. H. Arnold Barton, Letters from the Promised Land: Swedes in
A m e r i c a , 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 1 4 (Minneapolis, 1975) contains Peter Cassel's letter from
Iowa of February 9, 1846, giving misleading directions to New Sweden.
Kevin Proescholdt, while a student at Iowa State University in Ames, did
research into the Cassel family, from which he is descended. In 1976 he
prepared an unpublished study, "Dalander Cemetery: Biographical Di­rectory,"
which has been a useful reference. It is gratifying that college-age
youth are interested in pursuing their roots. Regarding the trek of
the Mormons from Nauvoo, Illinois, across Iowa on their way to the Great
Salt Lake, I have done extensive research in the Midvale, Utah, Public
Library.
171

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THE DALANDER COLONY AT SWEDE POINT,
IOWA
ROBERTA ANDERSON SMITH
When one is born into a community where many of one's
friends are the direct descendents of the founder, one absorbs the
history of the settlement and is never sure just where the in­formation
comes from. This is the case with me.
In 1846, the widow Anna Dalander and her party from Sweden
settled Swede Point (thirty miles north of Des Moines), which
later became Madrid, Iowa, where I was bom. They were look­ing
for New Sweden, some forty miles west of Burlington, which
their neighbor from Östergötland, Peter Cassel, had settled the
year before, but became lost because of a mistake in directions.
After the Cassels learned the whereabouts of the Dalanders,
Carl Johan (Charles), son of Peter, among others, came to Swede
Point. He took out a claim on land and married Ullricka (Ul­rika)
Dalander, daughter of Anna, in 1848. Theirs is thought
to be the first Swedish wedding in the state of Iowa.
It was among the descendents of these two families—the Cas­sels
and the Dalanders—that I grew up. The "Grandma" Da­lander
I knew as a child, was a daughter-in-law of Anna
Dalander; Eva Elisabeth Svensson had been twelve years old
when she came from Sweden, and at seventeen she had married
the widower, Eric Dalander, whose wife had died in childbirth
the year before. My older brothers and sisters remember her
more vividly than I, as in their childhood our family lived across
the street from her. Many a time, they told me, Grandma Da­lander
nursed one or another of them back to health with reme­dies
learned from the Indians when she first arrived in America.
Her cookie jar was always kept full by her daughter, Minnie,
with whom she lived during her later years, and her generosity
was well remembered by the children of the neighborhood. Grand­ma
Dalander died in 1917. When I had finished college and was
sailing for Japan for work in the Y. W. C. A., it was Minnie Da­lander
who came to the ship in San Francisco to see me off.
But before my generation, my father, B. Frank Anderson, came
182
to know the Dalander family intimately. In 1868, at eight years
of age, he went with his family from Illinois to Iowa in a covered
wagon, and his family lived for two years in a cabin built by a
member of the Dalander party. During that time, my father
worked for Mrs. Eric Dalander—our Grandma Dalander—haul­ing
in wood for her stove and doing odd jobs which a boy of his
age could perform. Father had an insatiable curiosity and plied
her with questions about life in Sweden, their trip on the sailing
vessel, and how they came to Swede Point to make their home
in the wilderness. It truly was a wilderness, for at the time the
party arrived in central Iowa, the Territory was not yet a state,
and the Indians were constantly on the move, en route to their
new homes in Kansas. There were no settlements nearby. It
was two hundred miles to Keokuk, where they had to go back
to purchase flour, salt, and other supplies that the land did not
yield, and to mail letters back to Sweden.
Father was a constant writer and his story of pioneer life was
featured in seven articles appearing during the first half of 1937
in the short-lived M i d n i g h t Sun, published in Des Moines. He
also wrote the story of the Dalanders' journey from Sweden in
a little booklet entitled A H i s t o r y S t o r y . When St. John's L u ­theran
Church in Madrid was erecting a new building in 1924,
Father was asked to write the story of the early settlers who
had founded the church, to be put in the cornerstone. The con­gregation
had been formed in 1859, he wrote, and by 1866 a gen­eral
meeting was called to erect the first church on land donated
by the Dalanders. Father joined the church when his family
arrived two years later. He records, "I remember that my first
contribution was to the church bell; it was all I had, a paper 10^5
bill about 3Vz inches long and lYz inches wide. That was in 1872
when I was 12 years old. That bell is still used and has about
the finest tone I have ever heard in a church bell."
For eight years my father lived with our family in Kenosha,
Wisconsin, where he wrote and talked about the pioneers, so that
we should know about them. At age ninety-two, "not old enough
to go there," he said, he went into the Iowa Lutheran Home in
Madrid, to "cheer up the old people." He celebrated his one
hundredth birthday there on February 29, 1960, and died that
December, content to meet his Master.
Father was noted as a storyteller of pioneer days. Young
163
people in Madrid schools were constantly going to him to learn
the history of their families, practically all of whom he could
remember. He shared his knowledge in so aimiable a way that
we, his family, and others, too, enjoyed his tales of early days,
and stored them in our memories.
F. A. Danborn, who owned the dime store in Madrid where
we children used to spend our hard-earned pennies for candy,
was an expert on local history. He wrote an article entitled
"Our Swedish Pioneers in Swede Point," which came out in Prä¬
rieblomman for 1909 (pp. 198-215)—where his name is given
as "Danbom"— the only article on the subject published in Eng­lish.
He no doubt received his information from Grandma Eva
Dalander as my father did, for their stories generally coincide.
There were others, too, who told of the old days. The family of
Mrs. Eva Dalander, wife of Eric Dalander,
was the last to die of the 41 Swedish immi­grants
who came to Iowa and settled at
Swede Point (Madrid) in 1846.
164
John Cassel, son of Carl Johan and Ullricka Cassel, were friends
of our family. One of their sons, my age, was confirmed with me.
Often our family would be invited to their home at the edge
of town, where I remember they had a tree with delicious June
apples.
When in later years I often returned to Iowa to visit my father,
I would see the late Julius Johnson, a grandson, and Esther Sund­berg,
a granddaughter of Eva Dalander, who were always ready
to share their memories of the early days of our town. Julius
was a young man suffering from hemophilia, who lived next door
to Father and was always solicitous for his welfare. He had a
keen mind and memory, and a strong interest in his forebears
which he would generously share with me. Esther Sundberg
wishes she had sought more information about the early days
from her grandmother, but she has verified dates and facts of
the Dalander family recorded in the family Bible.
$ 4 $
The Swedish ship, A u g u s t a , sailed out of the harbor of Gothen­burg
for New York on August 2, 1846, carrying a group of forty-two
persons from Östergötland, led by the widow Anna Dalan­der
from Västerlösa parish. They had been influenced to make
the journey by letters from their former neighbor, Peter Cassel,
who had left Sweden the year before and founded the settlement,
New Sweden, west of Burlington, Iowa, on the Skunk River. The
party now hoped to join them in the New World.
Anna Dalander, 44, had secured passports for herself and
family in Linköping under the name "Widow Anna Larsdåtter."
They called themselves Dahlander when they reached America.
As time went on, the spelling was changed to Dalander, by which
the family is now known. A l l but one. John Milton, great-grandson
of Anna Dalander, changed the spelling to Delander
when he went West. His wife, Dola, writes, "I never did hear
about the name Dahlander being taken after they reached Amer­ica.
I had it figured out that the name had its origin in Sweden
from people living in a valley or 'dal'."
Anna Dalander emigrated together with her six children: Eric,
25, Lars Peter, 24, Anders Johan, 22, Sven, 15, Anna, 23, and
Ullricka, 21. The girls came from "the factory in Motala"; evi­dently
they had been working away from home.
For the journey, the party took with them their own bedding,
165
food, and cooking utensils, as a stove for the use of forty fami­lies
was provided on deck. The men had with them tools and
equipment, to be ready to begin farming when they reached their
destination. Cassel had told of the farm land available, and they
hoped to make a good livelihood.
The A u g u s t a sailed through the Skaggerak and into the North
Sea, then out into the Atlantic Ocean, north of Scotland. Days
were much alike on the water, with the exception of Sunday,
when Jacob Nilsson, a devout layman, read from the P o s t i l l a , a
book of Martin Luther's sermons translated from the German
into Swedish. Anders Johan Dalander had a splendid tenor
voice and led the singing of familiar hymns.
On the Atlantic, a young man of their party, Johannes Jacobs-son,
died. The body was wrapped in sailducking and bound to
a ballasted plank. The passengers stood with bowed heads while
the captain read the funeral service; then the corpse was lowered
into the watery grave.
After a voyage of nine weeks and three days, the ship arrived
in New York. Here they were met by the Methodist minister,
Olof Gustaf Hedström, who conducted Swedish religious meet­ings
in a disbanded vessel called the Bethel Ship. Members of
the Dalander party attended these meetings and were given a
Swedish New Testament as they departed for Iowa.
Sources differ as to the manner in which the party went from
New York to Albany, to go west on the Erie Canal. One states
that they went by steamboat, another that they puchased a
barge in New York, which they covered so that they would be
protected from the heat of the sun and the rain.
Railroads had been built but did not extend to Iowa. Besides,
after visiting the railroad station and learning that the trains ran
at fifteen miles per hour, they thought they had better not risk it,
especially as the cars appeared very flimsy to them. All were
used to water travel in Sweden, which they felt would be safer.
From Albany, their barge—whether purchased there or in New
York— was pulled by horse or mule team the 364 miles of the
Erie Canal. They lived on the barge, buying their food at the
stations where supplies were sold to travellers, while the horse
or mule teams, driven tandem, were exchanged for fresh teams.
Finally at Buffalo, they were pulled by a paddle-boat on Lake
Erie to Toledo, Ohio, thence by way of Defiance to St. Mary's
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on the Miami-Erie Canal, and on to Cincinnati. From there they
floated down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River, and finally,
were pulled by paddle boat up to Keokuk, Iowa.
Between the towns of Keokuk and Burlington, the Des Moines
rapids on the Mississippi River presented an obstacle to naviga­tion
when water was low. It could be that in 1845 the Cassels
had arrived during high water and their boat had gone on north
to Burlington, where the Skunk River empties into the Mississip­pi.
That would make Peter Cassel's directions to the Dalander
party—"walk along the east side of the river and you will find
us"—reasonable.
However, it was a period of low water, or as one historian sug­gested,
the captain of the paddle-wheeler pulling the Dalander
barge felt that his dilapidated old vessel could not make the
rapids, so he unhitched their barge at Keokuk. When they saw
the Des Moines River emptying into the Mississippi there, the
Dalander party believed it was the river they should follow, so
they began inquiring for the Cassel settlement. No one they ap­proached
had ever heard of New Sweden or their friends.
It has been suggested that Cassel did not know of the two
rivers, the Skunk and the Des Moines. However, his letter of
February 9, 1846, notes: "Two educated countrymen from Väs­tergötland,
whose longer residence in the country has made them
thoroughly familiar with conditions and in whom we have the
highest confidence, have associated themselves with us and we
have taken a common claim to one thousand t u n n l a n d of the
aforementioned land, whose fertility and excellent location on
the navigable Des Moines River is not excelled by any tract in
the entire state of Iowa." However, they did not go there to
claim the land as they were getting along reasonably well where
they were and had excellent neighbors.
Therefore at Keokuk the Dalander party sold their barge.
Magnus Andersson and Jacob Nilsson bought a team and wagon
for hauling their trunks and household goods. The other families
hired men and teams for hauling, and the group was ready to
proceed on foot up the east side of the Des Moines River. Ac­cording
to one source, there was a stove factory in Keokuk,
where they bought a stove to carry with them. They also se­cured
supplies, such as flour, sugar, and salt.
That same year the Mormons had been expelled from Nauvoo,
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Illinois, just across the river from Montrose, a short distance
north of Keokuk. The Dalander party no doubt saw remnants
of this exodus of thousands to the Mormons' new location at Salt
Lake City, and felt sure that they were on the well-travelled
(for that time) route to New Sweden. However, soon the Mor­mons
crossed the Des Moines River and continued west across
the southern tier of Iowa counties. The Dalander party, keep­ing
to Peter Cassel's instructions, did not cross, but followed
along the east side of the river till they reached Fort Des Moines.
They did not know that when they were at Agency, where the
Indians dealt with the U. S. Government in the transfer of land
to the whites, they were less than 25 miles from New Sweden.
They found very few settlers the farther they walked from
the Mississippi, for the treaty of 1833 with the Indians had ceded
to the U. S. only land 50 miles west of the river for settlement.
Later treaties had ceded all of the Iowa Territory to the U. S.,
but the Indians were not all removed till 1846. However, no-
Charles Gaston, the first white settler of
Boone County.
168
where on their walk into the wilderness were they molested by
any Indians, who now, disgruntled, were en route to their new
home in Kansas.
Fort Des Moines, now the city of Des Moines, was a stockade
surrounded by a few log cabins, situated at the junction of the
Racoon and Des Moines Rivers. Mrs. Dalander tried to buy some
supplies from the soldiers of the garrison, but the only thing they
had in abundance were tobacco and whiskey, the latter being sold
at 30 cents a gallon.
Learning of the long journey this group of Swedes had made,
the soldiers urged them to settle there, to buy the land on which
the state capital now stands, which was then offered at $1.25
an acre. But the group was determined to find New Sweden and
continued to inquire for their friend, Peter Cassel.
Then one soldier recalled that a man by the name of Charles
Gaston lived about thirty miles north of the fort. Perhaps he
was the man they were looking for. The group decided to make
one more try to find their friends, so they continued up the beau­tiful
Des Moines River valley. At the southern edge of what
is now Boone County, the oxen hurried their pace and their
nostrils began to quiver as they smelled water. The men found
a spring, cleaned it out, and men and animals were all refreshed
by the cool, clear water. While there, a dog came barking to
greet them and a man appeared. He was the old soldier Gaston,
but alas, not one of the Cassel group. After serving in the army
in the 1830s, Gaston had just come in January to "the beautiful
land," as the Indians called Iowa, to stake a claim.
It was now the middle of September and time to build houses
for protection from the winter. After a conference, the group
decided that here was the place where they should stay. Here
there was a spring, the river was nearby for the women to wash
the clothes they had worn on the long journey, there would be
fish, deer, and other game to eat, and Gaston promised them po­tatoes
and corn from his stock to supply them for the winter.
It looked like a good place to settle down, for the soil was rich,
there were plenty of trees to fell for building their houses and
enough for fuel for the winter. They named their location Swede
Point, often spoken of as Swedes Point.
Before they began work, however, Mrs. Dalander sent a young
man back to Keokuk, 200 miles down the river, to mail a letter
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to Sweden to be forwarded back to New Sweden, in Iowa, to
tell Peter Cassel of their location. However, before the letter
reached them, the Cassels somehow learned of the whereabouts
of their friends and sent one of their group to Swede Point.
Having come to Swede Point by mistake, most of the Dalander
party now decided to join the Cassel group in New Sweden. Only
four families stayed, including Anna Dalander and her children,
Eric, Lars Peter, Anders Johan, Sven, Ullricka, and Anna Ca¬
thrine; Magnus Andersson, his wife and six children; Anders
Adamsson and wife; and Jacob Nilsson, his wife, and Eva Elisa­beth
Svensson, evidently their fosterdaughter—the Grandma
Dalander of my childhood—who married Eric Dalander in 1852.
Anna Cathrine Dalander meanwhile married Charles Gaston
sometime before 1850.
The group took out preemption claims to the land they oc­cupied.
Eric Dalander selected the land where they first built
their homes, in Section 23. Johan (John) Dalander took out a
claim in Section 26, Sven Dalander in Section 35, and the widow
Anna Dalander in the northwest corner of Section 36.
The story is told of Anna Dalander that two Indians armed
with long knives suddenly appeared in her cabin and pointed to­ward
the cupboard. Frightened, she took out one thing after
another in an effort to appease them, but they simple laughed
at her. Finally, when she took down a large plug of tobacco,
they drew their knives—but only to cut themselves each a good
chew, after which they peacefully departed, leaving the widow
badly shaken.
Anna decided her land would make a good location for a town,
which she first had platted in 1851. It was settled a few years
later, following her death in 1854, and came to be called Madrid.
The name was provided by Gaston, who served as her executor.
He is said to have often been sarcastic and spiteful. He had
a Spaniard working for him who constantly spoke of Spain and
its capital. When the time came for a final survey of Swede Point
in 1855, Gaston had a quarrel with the Dalander brothers. Hav­ing
the power to do so as Anna Dalander's executor, he is said
to have chosen the name Madrid for the new town to spite both
the Spaniard and the Swedes.
As the stage coach line had made a stop on Anna Dalander's
land, a post office was established at Swede Point. Later, in 1871,
170
the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad was laid through
Madrid, about a mile to the east, so a petition was sent to Wash­ington
to give the post office the same name as the town.
But Gaston did not quite win his altercation with the Swedes,
for to this day the town of Madrid is pronounced "Mad'rid" by
by everyone who knows Iowa.
NOTE
In addition to the recollections of my father and others I have known in
and around Madrid, my father's writings on the subject, and Danborn's
("Danbom's") article in Prärieblomman (1909), mentioned in the text,
several other sources have been of use in preparing this article. Beth
Proescholdt and Ruth Bergstrom's booklet, Documents and Descendants of
'Peter Cosset and the Settlement at New Sweden, Iowa (n. p., 1965), has
been helpful. Nils William Olsson, Swedish Passenger A r r i v a l s i n New
York, 1820-1850 (Chicago, 1967) provides valuable details on the early
settlers. H. Arnold Barton, Letters from the Promised Land: Swedes in
A m e r i c a , 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 1 4 (Minneapolis, 1975) contains Peter Cassel's letter from
Iowa of February 9, 1846, giving misleading directions to New Sweden.
Kevin Proescholdt, while a student at Iowa State University in Ames, did
research into the Cassel family, from which he is descended. In 1976 he
prepared an unpublished study, "Dalander Cemetery: Biographical Di­rectory,"
which has been a useful reference. It is gratifying that college-age
youth are interested in pursuing their roots. Regarding the trek of
the Mormons from Nauvoo, Illinois, across Iowa on their way to the Great
Salt Lake, I have done extensive research in the Midvale, Utah, Public
Library.
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